Bøger af Mauri Valtonen

This history of science analyzes how we came to be. It starts with life's origins and tracks the universe to present day, covering astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology and offering biographical details of science's greatest thinkers.

How do three celestial bodies move under their mutual gravitational attraction? This problem has been studied by Isaac Newton and leading mathematicians over the last two centuries. Poincare's conclusion, that the problem represents an example of chaos in nature, opens the new possibility of using a statistical approach. For the first time this book presents these methods in a systematic way, surveying statistical as well as more traditional methods. The book begins by providing an introduction to celestial mechanics, including Lagrangian and Hamiltonian methods, and both the two and restricted three body problems. It then surveys statistical and perturbation methods for the solution of the general three body problem, providing solutions based on combining orbit calculations with semi-analytic methods for the first time. This book should be essential reading for students in this rapidly expanding field and is suitable for students of celestial mechanics at advanced undergraduate and graduate level.

This work provides the current theory and observations behind the cosmological phenomenon of dark energy. The approach is comprehensive with rigorous mathematical theory and relevant astronomical observations discussed in context. The book treats the background and history starting with the new-found importance of Einstein's cosmological constant (proposed long ago) in dark energy formulation, as well as the frontiers of dark energy. The authorsdo not presuppose advanced knowledge of astronomy, and basic mathematical concepts used in modern cosmology are presented in a simple, but rigorous way. All this makes the book useful for both astronomers and physicists, and also for university students of physical sciences.

This book, written for a general readership, reviews and explains the three-body problem in historical context reaching to latest developments in computational physics and gravitation theory.